Category Archives: formal verse

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Notice the geography of freedom–
this open prairie made of flesh, the slow
swoop of the back’s small, curvature of skull,
the belly’s subtle knoll. The mirror shows
this vista of my body and I gaze,
try to commit this scene to memory
like a valley filled with bluebonnets
in April, touch this land of milk and honey
before the fall, my exile from myself.

The city’s towers rise like words of love.
A liquid sun drops honey. On the air,
something like lilac, blooming in a grove
that memory imagined. You were there
when maps had other colors. Here, the light
falls on you strangely; this is not the sky
you had a language for. Above, the flight
of birds you cannot name. The noble lie
of summer still surrounds you, but you keep
the knowledge of what follows: twilit snow,
the clouds where the forgotten gather sleep.
You travel in that quiet world below,
its constellations offering no chart,
with no companion but the secret heart.

I can smell
the melancholia in the bedsheets,
Rumpled feelings all around,
Everyone looking down at mouth.
The dog still licks her wound,
Hidden in the shadow of the desk.
There is no sense of release,
Yet we look around and hope.

“Go in fear of abstractions” of course, but what then?
I can’t expect the clock to stop as if it were my father’s heart.
The hedgerow stands with its roots unearthed,
Somewhere my mother calls and I bring my shovel.
I expect I will still rebel long after I cover them.

I expect I will still obey them.
Everything that happens to me happens to my friends.
After all that, we sit back and wonder
What the doctor will say about our liver
Or some other piece of the infernal apparatus
That wasn’t even hurting when we walked in.

The doctor still walks through the door,
Your mother’s hand, venial and soothing,
Comforts you and the tendencies of middle-age
Yet after a while she tears at your shirt
And you become her Confessor.

I know the friends and cousins cannot stand my ways—
my cleaning gears and baseboards no one will inspect.
They call my love of order a crimp upon my days,
seeing my routines as relics of a sect,
of Christian tyranny—cannot fathom how
anyone of passion could willingly submit
to reins and regulations. “There is no time but now”
the motto of new rebels. No Top 40 hit
will celebrate my kind—our plodding path
does not contain the arcs that make hearts beat faster
but martyrs don’t live past The Ends. I’d rather do the math
and live on in the flesh than immortalized in plaster.
My tending of minutiae leads to what I crave—
my saved-up shekels equal license to be brave.